join our insect nation!

a naturalist from south florida. i really love bugs, plants, and natural florida. feel free to send me asks/submissions but i have a tendency to not notice them for weeks sometimes. i appreciate them though!

[senatortedcruz]

[detectivehole]

hung out with my young cousin today and she showed me "soul bug school" which is the gap between her toy chest and the wall where she secretly puts every dead bug she finds in the house

[thatdisasterauthor]

Drone incursions are becoming more and more of an issue when it comes to wildfires, so last year I designed these graphics, but I never got around to sharing them anywhere.

If you send your drone up during a wildfire, even if you don't feel like you are that close, all planes and helicopters in the area may have to be grounded which can have a massive and detrimental effect on first responders' ability to manage that fire.

If you send your drone up and a plane or helicopter hits it, no matter how small your drone is, it could crash that aircraft injuring or killing those on board and potentially people on the ground as well. Even if the aircraft stays up, it will have damage that could ground it for an indeterminate and potentially extensive amount of time, meaning one less resource is available for that fire and other fires.

Just don't do it.

These graphics are free to use and distribute for any non-profit uses! You can check out my Payhip store to download (for free, or pay what you want) a package of files that include vertical versions of each design, print sizes, and social media sizes.

If you want to check out the other disaster and disaster education resources I have available, visit my website.

[whatsthebird]

What's the Bird?

Location: Wisconsin

Date: September

Bird - 973 is ...

Roseate Spoonbill

Greater Flamingo

Royal Spoonbill

American Flamingo

None of the Above

Show Results

Remaining time: 5 days 17 hours

We ask that discussion under questions be limited to how you came to your conclusion, not what your conclusion was.

Answer hidden under the cut.

American Flamingo - graciously submitted by @welegato2

No spoilers please!

Keep the game alive! Submit a bird HERE

[geopsych]

how do you keep the despair at bay? your photographs are always so mesmerising, but seeing the tag "summer as it was before" really did something to the pit of my stomach.

I don't always manage to keep the despair at bay. But I've found meaning in it. A lot of things and places that I took pictures of when I started have been destroyed or changed completely now. I wasn't expecting the extent of it. Huge native trees cut down, beautiful landscapes domesticated, lingering patches of native wildflowers wiped out, meandering mountain streams channeled, and at this point all the devastating effects of 3 years of severe drought which turns thriving populations of fish and turtles and waterbirds into sets of a few struggling individuals: It's been hard to watch. :read more:

Some things have been destroyed by storms, some by drought, some by new insects, especially spotted lantern flies, but most by people, some by people who just don't care and some by supposed government environmental departments who should know better but who don't think in terms of one small place or ever pay enough attention to that place to really know what would be best for it. They cut down more magnificent old native trees than anyone else. In the park near my house the decision was made to spray herbicide at the base of every tree, no matter how beautiful, even the specimen trees of special species that people paid to have planted in memory of loved ones. Since they started that about five years ago, maybe more, I have watched gorgeous healthy trees—flowering cherries and beautiful firs, very old pines and many others—deteriorate badly. My favorite cherry's trunk is riddled with fungus. A magnificent Fraser fir is in awful condition and as now has happened with several old and stately trees, will probably be cut down with the excuse that it was sick, never acknowledging that it was caused by spraying the roots with plant killer. I could go on but won't. I certainly have not helped with your despair, I'm afraid. I suppose what keeps me going at this point is that all of this has made it more obvious to me that I should capture whatever beauty I find and share it because I know without a doubt that it could be gone tomorrow. My town used to have an extraordinary number of breeding bluebirds for example, but three or four different projects by different entities, not related, eliminated all but one or two of the nesting sites so that now I am pleased when I hear any bluebirds at all. Now I always try to get a picture because it's real to me that one year there may not be any bluebirds here at all.

It has given my picture-taking a meaning and urgency it didn't have when I started. I can never capture it all before it's gone but at least some of it won't have disappeared unseen. I don't think most people suspected how beautiful it was here. It isn't a tourist destination or an Instagramer magnet. But to me it is so alive, so graceful and poetic, every species and landform here so heart-achingly beloved, it's unthinkable for it to disappear without at least a few people being shown that here was something simple and wonderful, like the Shire before Saruman came. And yet this is still just a remnant of the life that was here long ago when it was the Lenape people's sacred homeland, and I bear that legacy in mind too. Despair? Yes, despair is warranted. But if I let myself wallow in it I won't do justice to what's being destroyed before my eyes. When it's finally all gone, then I'll take time to cry. 💙

[great-and-small]

[plaguedocboi]

So every year, my aquarium does a captive lobster hatchery project (hence all the loblings). The reason we’re doing it is because in the wild, loblings only have a 1 in 25,000 chance of surviving their larval phase. They’re plankton as babies and everything eats them. Additionally, as the Gulf of Maine warms, they are having even lower survival rates because the blooms of copepods they feed on as babies are happening earlier in the year, and they’re missing it.

Obviously, the goal of this experiment is to grow the lobsters until they’re big enough to settle to the seabed and then release them, because they have a much higher likelihood of surviving to adulthood when they’re able to hide. Ideally, captive lobster hatcheries can boost the wild population and keep things stable, so we don’t have a major crash in a decade or two.

The first year we tried this was pretty bad. We had a lot of eggs, but very few babies. It turned out that the CO2 levels in the building spiked as more guests visited throughout the summer, and that settled into the water and threw off the pH and caused a chemical reaction that prevented a lot of the eggs from hatching. I think we ended up releasing three baby lobsters (which is still better than their wild survival rate but not great).

The second year was a little better. We added a de-gasser to the aquarium and got a ton of larval lobsters, but right as they were settling to the bottom we had a disease outbreak that killed most of them. We ended up releasing four babies at the end of the season.

But this year? Oh boy. We have so many lobsters that we had to release the first round early (usually we wait till September or October so guests can see them). We just released a total of FIVE HUNDRED AND TWENTY FIVE baby lobsters, and we still have over a hundred who haven’t settled to the bottom yet. I genuinely don’t even have words to explain how cool this is. OVER FIVE HUNDRED. We just added hundreds of lobsters to the wild population that wouldn’t have been there otherwise.

Conservation is so fucken sick

[floridensis]

80s kimwipes

[kuttithevangu]

OK I keep seeing people refer to the Michigan parasite outbreak and then others will chime in “it’s in my state too!” so to clarify this for everyone it is a NATIONWIDE outbreak reported in 31 US states as of today, July 12th 2026. There is no reason to assume it is not present in the rest of them

Cyclospora, the ‘Explosive Diarrhea’ Parasite, Cases Reported in at Least 31 States: See the Map

NBC News’ tally shows at least 26 states have reported cases of the parasitic stomach illness, as health authorities race to find the source

[kuttithevangu]

The CDC is tracking cases but they are significantly lagging behind the states on numbers (their data is weeks behind) so it’s probably going to be most effective to check your individual state’s infectious disease tracking.

This is a parasite that usually causes about 3000 cases of illness per year in the USA, Michigan currently has reported about 2900 (the confusion about “Michigan outbreak” is because Michigan is the first that caught an uptick in cases and has been very proactive about trying to trace them). Last official update from Massachusetts was 18 cases here centered in Greater Boston. The CDC recommends NOT assuming there are no sources of the parasite in your state even if no cases have been reported.

It isn’t an unknown illness but it is an unusual quantity of cases, and the fact that they haven’t been able to pin down the source after weeks of tracking is what makes it particularly concerning this year (harder to contain).

Wash your hands, wash your produce, cook it ideally, and advocate for farm workers to have access to safe and hygienic toilet facilities

[luesmainblog]

that last part is extra important. nearly every one of these produce outbreaks are because of poor hygenic practices on the fields, and particularly, because field workers do not have adequate access to bathrooms. nobody wants to poison your food, but they often don't have a choice. they also often lack proper access to water, cooling equipment (such as sun hats and portable fans), and management; this can make it significantly harder to think clearly and make a wise decision, let alone survive the day. when this comes up in conversation, call this out. make sure everyone around you KNOWS that the reason the lettuce is constantly unsafe is because farms are not giving a shit about worker welfare, and the people growing and picking your lettuce have to walk ungodly distances in 100+ degree weather without water just to take a shit. oh, and if they DO choose to do that, they may be punished for taking an unscheduled break.

if you wanna go further, let everyone know that the majority of labor laws have an exception carved out for agricultural workers.

[kuttithevangu]

One U.S. visa program is growing rapidly. No one is happy with it

Republicans on Capitol Hill are starting to talk about one facet of immigration reform: how to expand the popular H-2A visa program for farm

Worth keeping up with developments in the fight over farm workers’ visas because while trying to get legal documents for workers, agricultural producers are also trying to fight for those legal documents to have fewer human rights provisions in them

[northerlyy]

Purple Pitcher Plants (Sarracenia purpurea), taken July 14, 2026, in New Hampshire, US

Thousands of pitcher plants nestled within the sphagnum moss mat of a bog! This was my first time in a bog, and I was (and still am) so in awe of how all of the pitcher plants looked on the vivid red ground. Red and green is one of my favorite color combinations, so to be surrounded in nature by the exact shades I love seeing together was incredible. I took tons of close-ups of individual pitchers, but I started zooming out at the end in an attempt to communicate the sheer number of plants there were. It felt like they never ended, and it was amazing!

[greycatbird]

Somebody (DCR?) cut down a bunch of pondside vegetation the other day and the next morning North America's brightest engineering minds were already hard at work sorting through the debris

[ot3]

looking for animal references on image searches has always kind of sucked but it's much worse after AI image generation technology has begun to actually past muster, which is why i always just go straight to inaturalist. can't recommend this highly enough. you get to both find out about niche species you've never even heard of and also see some really good photographs like this one

x

[herpsandbirds]

Beetle Fly (Celyphus sp.), family Celyphidae, Malaysia

Yes, this is actually a true fly! (order Diptera)

photographs by Jack K H Loo

[junestrings]

a lot of people dont care about insect biomass collapse bc when they hear we are losing 2.5% of the insect biomass per year they just imagine the cockroach and housefly population decreasing by that much. they dont realize those are among the only ones that will remain unbothered

[mary-laib]

It's especially alarming considering how many bugs there are out there. Like 2.5% doesn't feel like a lot, but there's about 30 million species and an estimated 10 quintillion (10,000,000,000,000,000,000) insects alive rn. So that's 250 quadrillion (250,000,000,000,000,000) insects being lost.

For comparison, there are only 8.3 billion (8,300,000,000) humans alive right now. If 2.5% of that population was lost, we would lose 207.5 million (207,500,000). Which is still a lot, but only about one billionth of the loss we are seeing currently in bug populations.

That's not even mentioning how vital these creatures are to the ecosystem. The spiders and tarantulas that scare you eat the mosquitoes, ticks, fleas, flies, roaches, and sometimes mice that bother you so much. The mosquitoes are a huge food supply to all manner of insectivores. Frogs, spiders, lizards, etc. A collapse of the mosquito population would lead to further collapse of other populations and possibly whole ecosystems. Roaches are detrivores that feed on dead or decaying material, speeding up the decomposition process. Without them, it would take much longer for material to decay into viable nutrients for soil. Not to mention the absolute ecosystem collapse that would occur due to pollinators being suddenly gone.

[batsandboba]

me: hey inat i found this weird bug in the bathroom can you help me out? it’s like a moth fly thing

inat:

hm. well. can’t argue with that i guess.

[weaselle]

I know i've said it before, but if you are concerned it could be real and not a scam, the best way to avoid getting scammed is to return contact separately.

Here's how that works:

say you get a text from your internet provider, let's say it's Comcast (whom i hate). So you have this text that says it's from Comcast about your bill with a contact number and a clickable link -- could be real, could be a scam.

Don't touch anything about this text. Open a web browser and look up the customer service number for Comcast. Or get the number from the bill they send you. However you do it, get the contact info for Comcast from a trusted source, like an official phone directory or the Comcast website itself.

Get in touch with them using that information.

So. Let's run the example both ways it could go.

If it IS a scam: you reach out to Comcast and tell them you were contacted about a problem with your bill, they look you up in their customer database, and they tell you there is no problem with your bill.

If it's NOT a scam, you do the same thing, they look you up, and they explain the problem. In this case, neither Comcast nor the employees involved give a single shit whether or not you clicked the link in the text vs. going through their official website.

This works the same for the your bank, the IRS, Amazon, political causes, charities, everything.

By handling any questionable incoming calls to action this way, you significantly protect yourself from scams and malware and shit

[hometoursandotherstuff]

Awesome alligator carpet at the Chloe Hotel in New Orleans.

https://designpulp.net/wanderlust-new-orleans/